23 October
Just occasionally we get to see something which fires the imagination, giving us an awareness of the extraordinary possibilities of the performing arts. Samsara from the Aarkash Odedra Company, is a ‘road story’ based on the classic Chinese tale, Journey to the West, of monks who set off on a journey, both literal and metaphorical, and is told from the perspective of the Sanskrit word, ‘Samsara’, the concept of the constant, cyclical flow of life.
With dancers, Aakash Odedra and Hu Shenyuan the company has two artists with almost unfathomable, preternatural powers of description. Each with limbs which seem almost liquid in their articulation (I use the term in both senses) and shifts our understanding such that it becomes illuminated by a new, oblique and unfamiliar light. This is dance as language and language as dance in an expression of the constant yearning for something ‘higher’.
Beginning with a birth or rebirth, one human from another, it explores the flow, the constant human yearning for a spirituality, a completion that never comes; in short the human condition in its cyclical round. The dance offers a window to possible, inchoate meanings where the physical and ethereal join forces. From the birth quickly arises a cultural conflict symbolised by stylised martial combat. From here a conciliation leads to a journey through a land of strange idols and which is accompanied by the constant tensions that both separate and bind us together.
The piece is visually rich in stunning images which abound throughout the piece. These spring from the peerless dancing of the duet and the precise lighting of Yaron Abulafia. The dance works within a combination of sounds – the soaring vocals of composer, Nicki Wells, the exciting, dramatic and driving percussion of Beibei Wang and the unsophisticated yet complex sound and singing of Michael Ormiston – conveying something powerfully atavistic.
The result shows us there need not be a separation between this heritage or that heritage, nor indeed some kind of homogenised blend, but suggests a fusion, literally the joining together of two distinct things to make something new in which the originals remain discrete and yet enhanced by the other.
The result is magnificent and uplifting, a tour de force of the application of physical skill to the imaginative possibilities, not only of dance, but of all the arts when approached in the spirit of discovery. It is a show which can be highly recommended to all, whether they have an interest in dance or not.
★★★★★ Graham Wyles 24 October
Photo credit: Chris Nash
